But they are understating it all. New York, I thought, is obviously humanity’s favorite child. It’s the best. Every parent says they don’t have a favorite child, but they lie; and everyone pretends that other cities have a chance of catching up with New York, but they don’t.
I realized all this in under thirty seconds, as the taxi flew over the Brooklyn Bridge—each metal thread of its suspension cables harp shining gold, in the sun—and threw us straight into Manhattan, at chest height to the skyscrapers. John had tipped the driver $50 to requisition the car stereo, and blasted Julian Cope’s “Double Vegetation” at top volume, thin metal window frames rattling with the bass.
There are five, huge, swinging chords in the very center of it—played on a guitar that sounds like a 747 on vertical takeoff—and John had timed it perfectly, so that those were the chords that blasted us over the bridge.
As we entered Manhattan, I felt like my hair was trailing out behind me, from the gloriousness of our entrance.
“Did you do that on purpose?” I asked, drunk on how astonishing it had been.
“Very much so,” he replied. “God, I love showing you new things.”
On the plane, John had asked me two questions: “Do you want to talk about it yet?”
To which I had replied: “No. Later.”
And: “What do you want America to be, babe?”
To which I’d replied: “Two friends, having an amazing dreamtime interlude?”
“Two friends. Gotcha,” he’d said, cheerfully.
“How long can I stay?” I’d asked, in a tiny voice.
“How long can you stay?” he’d repeated, incredulously. “As long as you want.”
At the hotel, after we checked in—rooms adjoining, bags dumped, showers had, to wash off the mysterious plane sweat—John met me in the lobby.
“Babe, it’s three p.m., and you’re in New York. I’ve got to go off and be a bit of a rock star wanker for a bit—so I got you this.”
He gives me one of the tourist maps off reception. He’s drawn circles around various things.
“A walk in Central Park is always awesome, or you could get a taxi to Greenwich Village, and feel the Dylan vibes. There’s the Empire State, of course, but I thought you might save that, and we could go together, later . . . ?”
He says it doubtfully—like he doesn’t want to presume.
“I’m staying with you, you fool!” I laugh. “What are you going to do?”
“Just the usual twattery—honestly, I bore myself with it. Just go—have fun!”
“I will not do New York until we can go halves on it,” I say, walking him toward the door. “Come on. Let’s get a cab. I want to watch you at work.”
In the cab, John is oddly restless—like he’s nervous about what he is going to do. I’ve never seen him being nervous about his job before. Mind you, I’ve never seen him do his job sober before. Something has, clearly, changed.
When we get to the venue, he goes to the boot of the cab, takes out his guitar with one hand, takes my hand with the other, and walks toward the venue. Then suddenly, he stops.
“You know that thing?” he says, looking at me. “That you wrote for me? About fans? Teenage girls? It has . . . changed things.”
He starts walking again.
“I hope I get it right.”
There are maybe two hundred and fifty, three hundred people here, all very young, and—oddly for a gig—more than half of them are girls. The kind of girls you don’t see on TV, or in magazines.
Fat girls, odd girls, short girls, tall girls, girls in hats, girls with big feet; girls with big faces and clever, witchy eyes. Girls in clothes they made themselves; their fathers’ clothes; their grandfathers’ clothes. Girls with cherry-red hair, and green hair; girls holding records they love. Girls with bottle-bottom glasses that speak of reading late at night, under dim lights. And all young. None over the age of twenty. These are half-children, with all the bubbling raw potential and chaos that entails. Girls—like me.
They emit a faint buzz of excitement, as John approaches the stage door. He waves at them—they wave back; some jump up and down, with excitement—and then he is whisked through the door by an assistant.
“The licensing laws on venues here are tight,” John explains, as we walk through the venue, and the stage, at the back. “If you’re under twenty-one, a lot of venues won’t let you in. So we’re having what my agent lovingly refers to as ‘a Toddlers’ Tea Party’ here—letting the young ones come to the sound check, before the bar opens.”
He climbs up onto the stage, and starts quickly tuning his guitar.
“He also refers to these events as ‘Jail-Bait Rock,’” John adds, hitting “G” over and over. “He’s a pungent phraseologist. Right! In the words of Paul McCartney, let them in!”
The venue assistants open the doors, and the girls pour in—some running down to the front to get the best position; and some hanging at the back, waiting for friends. Fizzing with the pre-birthday excitement that comes in the silence before music.
As everyone shuffles into place, John leans into the microphone. “Good afternoon, Young America!” he shouts, still fiddling with the guitar. “As you know, New York City does not allow you to rock out at night, so in the spirit of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, we’re putting the gig on—right here!”
There is a cheer.
“We’re only allowed to play for thirty-five minutes”—boos—“so I’ve chosen the set list by a simple process of democracy. I’ve studied which are my most popular songs, by way of their chart placings, and am going to play them in ascending order of success. You ready?”
Screams.
“Let’s go!”
It isn’t the best gig I’ve ever seen John play—there have been nights where I’ve seen him lose himself so completely in a song, it’s like he’s singing along with an invisible choir in the room. Harmonizing with things that don’t exist.
But it is the sweetest I’ve ever been to. With the audience so young, and sober—no clusters of drunken men, pushing down the front—the dancing is free and, frankly, silly . . . girls spinning round and round; waltzing with each other.
The first stage diver is a gangly boy of no more than fourteen—when he makes it onstage, he bows, and then dances like Kermit the Frog.
John beams throughout the whole thing. After the first stage diver jumps back into the audience, he shouts, “Anyone else wanna come up here?” and the stage is suddenly flooded with teenagers climbing up; leaping around; kissing him, then jumping back into the crowd.
The gig ends with John, almost hidden in the crowd, handing his guitar to a chubby teenage girl, and saying, “Go for it, babe! SHRED!”
She is absolutely terrible—her playing comes from the Suzanne Banks School of “strings at the front”—but, halfway through, she assumes the wide-legged stance of Slash, from Guns N’ Roses, and John is laughing so hard, all he can do is hug her.
“Thank you very much, New York,” he says, putting his arm around her, as the stage erupts. “I will now be signing records, at that table, over there, for those who wish to marvel over how one man can make the word ‘John’ look so illegible. Good evening!”
He then jumps straight off the stage, and heads to a table, set up at the back of the venue. The audience forms an orderly queue, and the signing begins.
The first two fans are perfectly straightforward—just asking for a signature, saying, “I love the record! It’s beautiful, man!” before going on their way.
The third girl, however, is visibly shaking as she walks toward John—and then bursts into tears. She’s a girl not much older than me, in truth—and with the same ratty dye job, and Doc Marten boots, but pierced everywhere: ear, nose, tongue. The kind of piercings that look like each one was made, like a pin pushed into a war map, to mark a battle that was fought. She hums with bad history.
As soon as she starts crying, John comes out from behind the table and hugs her—murmurin
g “Don’t cry, sweetness—don’t cry. You’ll start me off!”
“I can’t believe I’m meeting you!” she sobs. “I thought of so many things to say, and I can’t remember any of them now. I love you so much.”
She is absolutely inconsolable—shaking and crying.
“And now I’m crying in front of all these people,” she says, mortified.
John hugs her hard, to his chest. “You all think crying is cool, yes?” he asks the crowd.
They all cheer.
“See?” he says, gently, to the girl. “Crying is cool. You’ve started a trend. Look—I’m going to write that on your record—then it’s official.”
He scrawls “CRYING IS COOL—OFFICIAL” with a Sharpie on the CD, and signs it, with a flourish.
“You’ve got me through so many bad days,” the girl says, in a rush, as John gently wipes the tears off her face with his sleeve. “My parents broke up last year, and it got really dark, and I just shut myself in my room, and listened to you over and over.”
“Sometimes, that’s just what we’ve got to do, man,” John says, quietly. “Just got to chrysalis in our rooms, waiting for summer.”
There is a queue of over two hundred people, and I know, from John’s schedule, that he has only an hour here.
But, somehow, he manages to spend time with every one of the troubled, broken kids who comes up to him—signing their records, arms, and diaries, talking to them, telling them they look hot, or beautiful, or—in the case of two kids, a boy and a girl, who have a certain energy about them, “You know what, my darlings—you have an air of destiny about you.”
As soon as one person is ushered away, another takes their place, so John does not see the reactions of those he’s just met. But I do.
Most leave smiling—clutching their records like treasure. Many run into the arms of waiting friends, like they’ve just scored a goal, or met God. Some punch the air. One runs round and round, clearly unable to control their adrenaline high. And one goes over to her waiting parents and collapses, weeping “I love him so much!” as her parents crowd around her, like deer around a sad Bambi.
I think about how brave it is, to do this: to queue up, and meet your hero. There’s something incredibly intimate about reading, or listening, or looking at someone else’s art. When it truly moves you—when you whoop when Prince whoops in Purple Rain; or cry when Bastian cries in The NeverEnding Story, it is as if you have been them, for a while. You traveled inside them, in their shoes, breathing their breath. Moving with their pulse. A faint ghost of them imprinted, inside you, forever—it responds when you meet them, as if it recognizes its own reflection.
And this is why meeting an artist you admire is always such an uneven, unfair thing. For they—they don’t recognize you at all. You shake their hand, feeling as if you are seeing a dear, old friend again—remembering all the times you shared, together—and they look back at you, as if you are a stranger, and say, quizzically, “And what name would you like me to sign it to?” And you remember: they did not share those times at all. You were there—but they were not.
You can’t meet your heroes—because they are, in the end, just an idea, that lives inside you.
This is why I feel such love for John—watching what he is doing, with all these fans. They are not meeting him—he is meeting them. He is looking them in the eye, conspiratorially; he is hugging them, like they have imagined hugging him. He is saying, “We meet—at last!” He is telling them they are as wonderful as they feel when they listen to him. He has . . . completed the circle of putting art out, into the world. He sent those songs out into the world, not knowing who would receive them, and now, one by one, they are coming to him, and saying, “I found it. I get it. It worked. It made a piece of me—just here.”
And he is saying, “And I see it has made you glorious. Thank you. That was just what it was supposed to do.”
When we get back to the dressing room, after the signing, John’s arms are full of presents, given to him by his fans. A book, a poster, some badges—a packet of cigarettes, a miniature of whisky, smuggled in. A doll—a John doll, made of felt, and wool.
“I hope this has not been used for voodoo,” John says, turning it over, in his hands. “Although it would be comforting to learn my hangovers were not alcohol poisoning, but witchcraft.”
“That was—that was so lovely,” I say—gesturing out to the now-empty auditorium. “You made those people so happy.”
“Well, I had some good advice,” John says, looking over at me. He goes over to his guitar case, and takes from it six, very crumpled, very stained sheets of A4 paper.
It’s the piece I wrote for him, and left in his hotel room, in Eastbourne.
“I have read this many, many times,” he said, looking down at it. “At first, I have to admit, I was peevish about it. ‘I am a rock star!’ I thought. ‘I know how to do my job! I have won awards! I have had hits! I have been drinking with Richard Madeley! I have been a guest on Steve Wright in the Afternoon! I don’t need advice. A rock star does not take advice—unless it is on matters of off-shore tax breaks. A rock star broadcasts—he does not receive.
“But then I read it—and got to the end, and read it again; and then again, the next day—and thought, perhaps, all rock stars do need advice. Perhaps this is why so many go mad, or die, or become monstrous. They are all, generally, godless children, badly parented, bullied, friendless. Odd. Then they become famous, and they start talking—and they never stop. They are suddenly, God help them, authority figures to people just a couple of years younger than them. They’re constantly asked for opinions, and advice—when they’re just toddlers, leading babies. People stop telling them things. They stop learning. They go unquestioned.”
He gestures to the paper. “But you—you told me things. You questioned me.”
He hugs me.
“I once read how the primary problem is that developmentally, you freeze at the age you become famous,” I say, face buried in his coat. “It’s very interesting.”
I really do find it interesting. But unfortunately, at this point, as if to disprove my assertion, I start yawning. I am so, so tired. The last forty-eight hours feel like long years. John takes stock of the situation.
“You look like shit, Dutch,” he says, gently. “When was the last time you properly slept?”
I’m so tired, I can’t even work it out.
“Baby, I’m going to get you a cab. You need to get back to the hotel, and sleep.”
“I’ll get my second wind,” I say, feebly.
“I think you’re already on your fifth, babe,” he says, gently, putting his head out into the corridor, and calling his tour manager. “I’m just going to deal with some rock ’n’ roll business here, and then I’ll be back at the hotel by eleven. I’ll see you in the morning. Don’t die in the night. Breakfast in America is one of the very greatest things.”
He kisses the top of my head, and I walk out to the cab, sleep drunk, in the rain, with his arm around me.
He tells the cabdriver which hotel to take me to, and hands him $30. “She’s precious cargo,” he says. “The world absolutely pivots on her survival. Drive with care.”
He takes off his fur coat, and wraps it around me, like a blanket.
My head is already lolling on the car seat as we do a U-turn, and pull away—John standing, in his shirtsleeves, in the rain, waving.
30
Letter to John Kite, March 7th, 1995
John, I did a lot of thinking—about what it must be like to stand on a stage; and what it must be like to have people you’ve never met love you. And I wrote you this. D xxxx
There is one terrible weakness you can have, if you amusedly and self-deprecatingly describe yourself as an artist, and become famous. One letdown if you become loved by millions, and your work is meaningful work. And that is if some of the millions who know, and love you, are teenage girls.
There is nothing more shaming than to be loved by teenage
girls. The love of teenage girls is not merely substandard, or worthless—it is an active mortification to an artist. Our language is full of how little we think of artists who are loved by teenage girls: we talk of “mad fans,” and “teenyboppers,” and “little girls wetting their knickers.”
Oh, you can take those girls’ money, and become elevated on their devotion, and enjoy them putting you at Number 1—you can do all those things; no band ever refused them—but you do not respect those girls. You do not want to talk to them, or look them in the eye, or hang out with them, or love them back. You do not talk about them—unless it is to turn to your “cool” fans—the men—and mouth, Sorry. These mad girls have crashed the party. So embarrassing. Of course, they don’t get it. Only you get it. Men are the right fans to have.
This is why rock is cooler than pop; acid house is cooler than disco; prog cooler than boy bands. Things that boys love are cooler than things girls love. That is a simple fact. Boys love clever things, cleverly. Girls love foolish things, foolishly. How awful it would be to love bands like teenage girls do. How awful it would be to be the wrong kind of fan—a girl. How awful it would be to be a dumb, hysterical, screaming, teenage girl.
How amazing it is to be a dumb, hysterical, screaming, teenage girl. How amazing to go to a gig thinking of nothing but how loud you will shout; how hard you will dance; how much you will sweat; how tightly you will hug your friends, as your favorite song plays. How amazing to react to music in the way the music wants you—to become an ecstatic animal. To murmurate, in your millions, through the cities—calling to each other, in billows of girls, as you head to a gig, to exult.
How amazing to scream at the top of your voice, and see the band respond to your call: they play faster, they play harder, they look sexier, they look out into the audience, and smile. How amazing to give yourself completely, expecting nothing in return.